Consumers can get a look at the actual prices paid by insurers for health care Wednesday morning when a new free website, Guroo.com, goes online.
The data show that, on average, Dallas is an expensive place for hospital care. Dallas area lab and imaging tests, meanwhile, are priced lower costs than those paid by other Americans.
Guroo.com was built by the Health Care Cost Institute, a Washington-based nonprofit that has collected more than 3 billion insurance claims for over 50 million Americans for research purposes. Aetna, Humana, United Healthcare and Assurant have provided records to the institute with patient names removed.

WASHINGTON – Twenty years after NAFTA was approved, the U.S. Department of Transportation said late Friday that Mexican truckers were now welcome to apply for long-haul trips in the United States.
U.S truckers fought hard to stop this aspect of free trade with Mexico, both in the courts and in Congress. Other opponents focused on perceived safety hazards and pollution, but the risk to some U.S. jobs seemed the point that caused the most concern in Congress.
President Barack Obama and Mexico’s President Enrique Peña Nieto met at the White House Tuesday, where both leaders referred vaguely to improving cross-border commerce. U.S. officials said Friday’s announcement should bring an end to $2 billion in trade tariffs that were imposed by Mexico because of the trucking dispute.

Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas was among those penalized for safety reasons

Texas Health Presbyterian, Medical City Dallas, Baylor University Medical Center and Parkland Memorial Hospital will lose millions of dollars in Medicare reimbursements next year because of accidents and infections acquired by patients.

A dozen other North Texas hospitals were also penalized in an assessment released by Medicare Thursday.

Under the 2010 Affordable Care Act, hospitals are judged on how many patients acquire infections from IVs and catheters used while they are in the hospital. They are also assessed on bed sores and accidental punctures or lacerations. Safety problems included in the scores took place between 2011 and 2013.

Beginning in fiscal year 2015, one-fourth of the nation’s hospitals that came in with the worst scores lose one percent of their Medicare reimbursements.

Hospitals rely on Medicare payments for up to two-thirds of their revenues. Baylor University Medical Center got about $267 million in Medicare payments last year. Texas Health Presbyterian got about $170 million, and Medical City Dallas about $129 million. The reimbursement amounts come from txpricepoint.org, the Texas Hospital Association’s price transparency web site.

Arlington physician Joseph Megwa was sentenced to 10 years in prison and ordered to repay $5.47 million for health care fraud Wednesday by U.S. District Court Judge Ed Kinkeade.
Megwa, 60, a Nigerian-American who handled patients from 230 home health care agencies, was convicted in May of conspiracy, three counts of fraud and four counts of making false statements for saying he had treated Medicare patients at their homes.
Megwa’s attorney immediately filed an appeal notice of his conviction and sentence. The appeal notice also said Megwa was indigent, and requested that a new lawyer be named to handle the case.
Kinkeade sentenced Megwa to 120 months in prison for four of the convictions, and 60 months for the other four, with the sentences to run concurrently.

A U.S. Customs officer interviews a passenger being screened for Ebola

Screening at U.S. airports hasn’t turned up a single case of Ebola since the program began on Oct. 11, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Tuesday.

The screening program has checked 1,993 passengers from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. Eighty-six of those passengers were referred to the CDC for further evaluation. Seven were symptomatic and taken to medical facilities. None of the seven tested positive for Ebola.

The enhanced screening is being used at New York’s Kennedy Airport, Washington Dulles, Newark, Atlanta and Chicago O’Hare.

The CDC said 102 passengers from the three affected countries traveled to Texas.

The CDC, the World Health Organization and other groups have meanwhile screened about 80,000 travelers at airports in the three countries hit with the world’s biggest Ebola epidemic. Since that screening began in August, about 12,000 of those passengers have embarked for the United States. None of the passengers allowed to travel have come down with the disease while traveling, the CDC said.

People shopping for health insurance on the federal Healthcare.gov exchange can get a quick view of changes in their 2014 policies through an online tool released Thursday morning by ProPublica, an independent nonprofit news group.

About 220,000 people in the Dallas-Fort Worth area signed up for a health insurance plan after Healthcare.gov began offering policies under the Affordable Care Act last fall. Most of those enrolling on the exchange are eligible for tax subsidies to make the insurance more affordable.

Many plans have changed for 2015. Some have higher premiums, a different mix of coverage or changes in deductibles. Unless policy holders use the exchange to buy another plan before Dec. 15, the federal government will automatically re-enroll them in their current plan.

WASHINGTON — Health care spending increased just 3.6 percent last year, the lowest rate of increase since the statistic was first calculated in 1960, federal officials announced Wednesday afternoon.
The cost of care reached $2.919 trillion last year, or an average of $9,255 per person. The final tally for 2013 was a slowdown from spending in 2012 and marked the fifth year in a row of low growth, said officials with the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Micah Hartman, a statistician with the CMS office of the actuary, said the lower growth since 2009 was in keeping with a pattern seen after the last three economic recessions and was not evidence of a permanent fix to the nation’s health care spending concerns.
“The impacts of recession on health care spending tend to peak approximately two to three years following the end of the recession,” he said. “The lag continued” in 2013.
In September, the federal agency predicted spending has started growing faster than the economy, and would climb at a 6 percent rate in 2015. Hartman said those projections remain unchanged.

The CMS health spending results were published on the Web site of Health Affairs, a monthly journal. They will appear in the magazine’s January edition.

The National Center for Policy Analysis, saying a scandal over the dismissal of its former CEO had brought it close to collapse, has sued prominent Dallas law firm Winstead PC and Winstead chairman emeritus Mike Baggett, claiming legal malpractice and breach of fiduciary duty.

The suit, filed Monday in State District Court in Dallas, seeks more than $1 million in damages.

Winstead CEO Kevin Sullivan responded in a written statement. “We look forward to vigorously defending these allegations and feel certain that a thorough review of the circumstances will show that Mike acted appropriately and ethically as he always does.”

The libertarian-oriented Dallas think tank fired John Goodman, its founding president and CEO, in June. The suit states the dismissal came after the board of directors learned Goodman, with Baggett’s help, had settled sexual harassment and assault accusations brought against him by an employee named Sherri Collins.

Collins made a new sexual harassment allegation against Goodman last February, according to the lawsuit.

When the full board learned of all this in April, “it shook the organization to its foundation, nearly resulting in the organization’s demise,” the lawsuit states.

After Goodman said he was ousted in a coup, the center issued a statement saying he had been dismissed for sexual misconduct and breach of fiduciary duty.

Goodman has repeatedly denied any sexual misconduct and sued the center for libel, resulting in an undisclosed settlement.

A waste disposal team during the Dallas Ebola outbreak Photo by Andy Jacobsohn Dallas Morning News

WASHINGTON — The Dallas Ebola cluster should teach other parts of the country to check for the virus when patients arrive at a care facility and quickly identify others exposed, the CDC said in a paper released Friday morning.
A dry summary of the Ebola outbreak urged other jurisdictions to also determine the safest way to transport suspected Ebola cases. The paper is available at http://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/USCDC/bulletins/dc89d3

A Dallas conservative think tank has chosen Allen B. West, a firebrand favorite of the Tea Party, as its new executive director.

West, who served one term in Congress as a Florida Republican, is scheduled to take over the National Center for Policy Analysis on Jan. 2.

“It will be policy, not politics that secures a sound economic future for Americans – with growth, opportunity and returning the promise of the American dream for this generation and those to come,” West said.

A Fox News commentator and veteran of both wars with Iraq, West joined the Tea Party caucus in Congress. He once called for pro-Palestinian demonstrators and “chicken men” Democrats to “get the hell out” of the United States, and said drivers with Obama bumper stickers are “a threat to the gene pool.”

West retired from the Army with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in 2004.